A sad disappointment of a film. Any project that combines the talents of Cole Porter, Rouben Mamoulian, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse ought to be something wonderful and stylish. Instead, it is a jocose, vulgar wreck. When Cole Porter et al. reworked Philadelphia Story and Taming of the Shrew, they managed to retain the spirit of the originals and to create something that stands up in its own right – fine songs, great dancing, good performances. Maybe the art of Lubitsch is more intractable.

The script did not help. It seems that George S. Kaufman’s book for the stage version did not make much use of the three rogue commissars so we have to blame Leonard Gershe and Leonard Spigelgass for what went wrong. Instead of the rapier of Billy Wilder we get a plastic dagger. For example, the second time that Ninotchka is sent to sort out the commissars, it is because they have entered a dance contest and won it with a cha-cha-cha. I think that the version in Ninotchka when they throw a carpet out of a window and complain that it doesn’t fly is about one million times more amusing. Not least since this particular cha-cha-cha would have been danced by Jules Munshin, Peter Lorre and Joseph Buloff! Who could possibly have seen fit to give them a prize?

In this film, Peter Lorre cuts a particularly sorry figure. For all his gifts, he was no physical comedian and it is painful to see him reduced to feeble clowning. He might well have been this kind of person in real life, but this does not mean that he could act that way on screen. He was M, der Verlorene, Joel Cairo, that guy in Casablanca….

Possibly the crux of the matter is that the script of Ninotchka has real emotional content. The plot has been constructed by a watchmaker. The commissars have to stay in the Royal Suite at the Grand Hotel because it is the only room with a safe big enough to hold the jewels they have extorted. We feel the sense of betrayal when the White Russians manage to rob the safe while Ninotchka is on the razzle with Melvyn Douglas. In Silk Stockings, the plot motive is simply deranged. Why would an American film producer commission a Russian composer to write music for an adaptation of “War and Peace” in which a Hollywood mermaid à la Esther Williams will star? Strange things happened in Hollywood but they need to meet the standards of probable possibility to make a film about them. It is an idea worthy of The Producers rather than a bittersweet romantic comedy. And then, to have the moment of betrayal triggered by a scene in which the Russians hear their adored music arranged as a swinging dance number! It is just too stupid to carry any emotional punch.

Cole Porter, for all his legendary refinement, was no enemy of vulgarity – he did write Mexican Hayride after all, and held stars such as Bobby Clark and Ethel Merman in high regard – but it is hard to see why he went along with this. Then again, it is a very weak score: only “All of You” has achieved any life outside the musical. Fred Astaire also seems out of place – hard though it is to imagine. It is strange that he is not involved in the best dance sequences in the film – Charisse’s elegant solo where she dresses in finery to the strains of “Silk Stockings”, and the athletic, rumbustious “Red Blues”. Dance styles had changed by 1957 and he was not getting any younger. The physicality of “Stereophonic Sound” or his duet with Charisse, “Fated to be Mated”, really do not suit his style. He also does an awkward jive take on his classic “Puttin’ on the Ritz” routine – “Ritz Roll and Rock”. It is well-documented how much Porter hated rock ‘n’ roll. His duet with Charisse to “All of You” feels like a pallid remake of their duet to “Dancing in the Dark”. There is no real chemistry between them this time.

And what was Mamoulian up to? He moves the camera gracefully. He introduces Fred Astaire in a sequence of foot-level shots – did anyone ever walk as distinctively as Astaire? He conjures a reasonable facsimile of Garbo out of Charisse but the script is so feeble that it is impossible for her to make us forget her predecessor in the role. What is really hard to accept is the terrifying vulgarity of Janis Paige’s performance as the Hollywood mermaid. She comes across as a blend of Ethel Merman and Martha Raye. In any other Astaire musical, she would have had a brief scene or two as comic relief: perhaps to make Ginger Rogers jealous. She slaps the side of her head repeatedly – apparently in an attempt to alleviate the deafness brought on by all the swimming she has done in Hollywood. They must have paid a lot for such a great gag! Her boisterous, stentorian performance of “Stereophonic Sound” threatens to shatter the screen. Her partner, Fred Astaire just looks ill-at-ease.

And then there is Jules. Sig Rumann at least had presence and authority, which made his slide into decadence amusing. Munshin was someone who aspired to be merely decadent – a man constantly striving to be no more than just tasteless.

It is 1955 and the indefatigable team of Comden and Green write what you have to see as a follow-up to On The Town. After the situation has been set up with the three pals’ return to New York at the end of the Second World War and their boisterous routine with dustbin lids, the action takes place in the space of a single day, ten years later. We are spared Jules Munshin: his place is taken by the much more assured and skilled Dan Dailey. Perhaps it had also got through to MGM that Gene Kelly was always better when paired with dancers, because the electric Michael Kidd is the third of the trio, rather than a singer such as Sinatra or a straight actor such as Van Johnson. It is a sour, alienating film. For none of the three has civilian life lived up to their hopes and dreams.

Gene Kelly almost always seemed to play an obnoxious guy in his movies – so annoying that, at times, you wonder why the women on whom he was forcing his attentions did not just ram a pencil up his nose. In this film, he has a motivation for his behaviour. He was jilted by his sweetheart before he got back from combat and has become a gambler rather than the lawyer or politician he seemed destined to become. Cyd Charisse had always had rather a spectral film career. Although in The Harvey Girls she had a few dialogue scenes, she was really there to do a graceful balletic dance to “Wait and See”. She appears in Singin’ in the Rain merely as the gangster’s moll in the “Broadway Rhythm” ballet. In The Band Wagon, her part fades away, although she does have the “Dancing in the Dark” and the “Manhunt” routines to imprint her on our minds. In It’s Always Fair Weather, she actually gets a substantial role as the TV producer. She also gets to perform a more vigorous routine than the ones she usually glided through – hurled round a boxing gym by a bunch of very physical men in “Baby You Knock Me Out”: the antithesis of “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love” sung by Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

As was customary in so many films of this particular era, there is a ferocious attack on the television industry in the shape of the show Midnight with Madeline with its blend of glamour and emotional overload epitomised in the performance of Dolores Gray. The style lives on today in any show hosted by Graham Norton.

The fact that the film was shot in Cinemascope does not seem to have hampered Stanley Donen at all – he is still addicted to fluid, complex tracking shots. But because this would tend to show up a lot of empty set in a standard solo musical number, it is possible that he deliberately decided to get around this by making the solos either group numbers – such as Charisse’s “Baby You Knock Me Out” or Madeline’s “Thanks But No Thanks”, or by setting Kelly’s “I Like Myself” on a street teeming with people and cars who have to make way for him. Donen also uses some highly creative touches to vary the size of the frame, for example, in the restaurant where each of the three old buddies shows up in his own slice of the frame to reveal his thoughts about his former comrades to the strains of the “Blue Danube” waltz. Later on, the three dance in perfect synchronisation, in three separate locations, to “Once Upon a Time, I had A Friend” – a split-screen effect that recalls Abel Gance’s Napoleon.

The highpoint though is surely Gene Kelly’s finest dance routine on film – “I Like Myself”. André Previn’s music is bouncy and rhythmic enough to allow Kelly to take flight on roller-skates, alternating tap steps with long graceful glides. The effort required stops him from falling back onto his tired clichés – such as the big dopey grin. In fact, in this film, the skittle only appears for a split-second, in the opening number. His character is not the sort of smug, self-satisfied man who did this mugging in so many other films.

As with On The Town, the film ends as the opening sequence did, with the camera craning high above the subway bridge, showing the three pals going their separate ways: but this time, Kelly has a girl.

Never one to ignore an opportunity to wring more royalties out of his back catalogue of songs, Arthur Freed got Comden and Green to write a film to showcase some of them. If it were not for the relentless plugging of MGM, would anyone even know these days that Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown wrote songs? As a song, “Singin’ in The Rain” has little of any merit about it. It could have been written by Kalmar and Ruby, De Sylva, Brown and Henderson, or any of the Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths. “Beautiful Girl”, “You Are My Lucky Star”, “All I Do Is Dream Of You” are so generic that you have to concentrate very hard to prevent yourself from drifting off into some nostalgic haze: they are so generic that they could almost be parodies.

The programme notes were an excerpt from a biography of Gene Kelly written by Clive Hirschhorn – a PR man’s biography, if this excerpt is representative. “Though the rest of Singin’ In The Rain never quite equals the magic of those five minutes of Gene dancing into the night, every number is still light years ahead of what was being seen in other screen musicals of the time.” Of course, he does not try to back up this claim, because it is a peculiarly idiotic and clumsy version of the puff direct. It also, unfortunately, misses what is genuinely good about this film.

It was comparatively rare for Gene Kelly to find himself with dance partners attuned to his style. The liveliness and vitality of Debbie Reynolds, the athleticism and boisterous enthusiasm of Donald O’Connor suited him so much better than, say, the elfin grace of Leslie Caron in American in Paris, which made him seem elephantine and lumbering. The sleek sophistication of Cyd Charisse as the gangster’s moll in the “Broadway Rhythm” ballet was much more interesting than the coolly academic stepping and posing of Vera-Ellen in On The Town. In Singin’ in The Rain, his tendency to get pretentious was halted by the fact that he had to work hard to outdo his partners on his natural territory.

In “Make ‘Em Laugh”, Freed and Brown got so close to the melodic line of “Be A Clown” from the Freed unit’s film The Pirate that you wonder why Cole Porter never insisted on a co-writing credit. The sheer exuberance of Donald O’Connor’s routine is probably the high spot of the film – sorry Mr Hirschhorn. Because he was working so hard, Kelly did not fall back on his lazy devices – the teetering skittle only crops up for a split-second in “Good Morning, Good Morning”, itself a strange echo of a number with Gene Kelly, Rita Hayworth and Phil Silvers (sic) from Cover Girl (“A New Day Tomorrow”). “Fit As A Fiddle” was an especially arduous number, which Kelly could never have performed with, say, Frank Sinatra, and the testimony is that both of them only went through with it for fear of losing face with the other.

“You Were Meant For Me” is a clear example of why this film stands out in Kelly’s career. The routine is almost identical with “Our Love Is Here To Stay” from American in Paris and yet Kelly is transformed – no longer massive and lumbering. Maybe Stanley Donen was a better director than Minnelli – heresy – or at least more sympathetic to Kelly’s aims. He keeps the camera moving and uses a lot of long-shots which lend grace to the dance rather than emphasise Kelly’s power. Also, Reynolds’s style of dancing just works better with Kelly: she is not striving for poise and line at all times. It is less self-conscious, more natural. Kelly does not start the routine by self-consciously taking up a stylised posture to invoke the Muses.

As for the title song, I have probably seen it too often to be objective and singing in the rain to express your joy is almost a cliché, if you have seen enough Hollywood musicals. I suppose it bounces along happily enough. The real joy, though, is the perfection of the camerawork. Donen and Kelly used complex tracking shots in just about all the big numbers, the camera whirling around in a manner that would make Max Ophuls swoon. Often, the camera ends up in odd places – such as the floor-level shots in “Good Morning” or the extreme high angles of “You Were Meant For Me”, the zooms in “Broadway Rhythm”. But in the title track, the camera movement is an extreme case. You have to wonder what the grips were saying as they laid down and took up tracks, moving the boom up and down and sideways, while the complicated dance was going on and the set was sluiced with water. It is hard enough in a dialogue scene to coordinate everything so that the camera and actors hit their marks at the right times; just how much more difficult does this get to manage it for a dance routine! As an unexpected bonus, the man to whom Kelly gives his umbrella at the end of the dance turns out to have been played by Snub Pollard.

For the moments when the screen is not occupied by a number by Freed and Brown, there is some witty dialogue and some fine character acting. Millard Mitchell as the studio boss and Douglas Fowley as the harassed director stand out. Yes, it is a fine film but is it really so much better than 42nd Street, Love me Tonight, Top Hat, The Band Wagon…?

The Harvey Girls is a film I have shied away from in the past – mainly because the cast, apart from Judy Garland and, possibly, Ray Bolger, hardly makes you suspect that greatness is in the offing (who was John Hodiak again?) but also because the “Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” routine has been wheeled out so often that it is tiresome, although it seems that Ray Bolger got burnt by the steam from the locomotive during the shoot. When you run down the cast-list, very few names leap out at you.

The songs were written by Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren, a strange pairing of rural youth and grizzled urban experience, but apart from that accursed number about a train company, nothing really survives. I think that Warren was at a stage in his career when he was husbanding his resources. He enjoyed working with Mercer because the young man was so fluent and versatile that he could fit words to anything that Warren came up with – there was no need to tamper with anything so that the words would fit. The score is not very distinctive melodically but Mercer’s lyrics always ride the line gracefully. “Wait and See”, the song that the saloon pianist played by Kenny Baker – the crooner in “At The Circus” – plays for Cyd Charisse – is possibly worthy of greater renown. It is one of those tunes that Sonny Rollins could sculpt.

Maybe the most interesting angle on the film is to consider that Judy Garland is up against Angela Lansbury as John Hodiak’s woman. They were very close in age. One was already a major star but doomed to an incandescent burn-out a mere 20 or so years later at a time when the other was just starting to consolidate a legendary Broadway reputation. In some ways, Lansbury gives a more mature performance than Garland in the film – but then Garland’s trademark was still a kind of tremulous innocence.

It is a nice film. It has Western ingredients – the saloon, the good girls versus the bad girls, a fight – but it does not have much of a plot. There are amusing moments – such as when Garland reclaims the purloined meat by holding up the saloon. There are touching musical moments – such as Garland’s ballad on the train or Charisse’s dance – but a lot seems to have ended up on the cutting-room floor. No clear narrative is built up – why is Virginia O’Brien so keen on Ray Bolger that she shoes a horse for him while singing of her disappointment in the “Wild, Wild West”? So disappointed, in fact, that she can hold a red-hot horse shoe in her hand without bother. It is fragmentary in structure. It goes for the obvious at all times. Angela Lansbury is woefully under-used and Ray “unfunny” Bolger is dreadfully over-used. Cinematography was by George Folsey – once the DP for Cecil B DeMille in the silent days – and it is a glorious film, visually. The desert has never seemed so colourful. But you wish that someone could have decided whether it was a chronicle, a love story, a Western…..

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